News, October 2004 • October 15, 2004, 11:44 PM

It never pours but it creates what I might call "hurry-canes". That's because I've been trying to rush things through in order to get them out of the way so I can devote more time to things that I've been given to do by others.

Case in point: I've recently begun working with a community choir called Harmonia, which my friends Tracy and Leona joined after leaving the Cumberland Community Singers. Because the music is largely unfamiliar to me, one of the things I need to do is put it into the computer part by part so I can get an idea of what the overall arrangement—and thus the accompaniment—should sound like. I got only part of one tune done by the time of my first Harmonia rehearsal on September 29. Then our choir director at St. Augustine's, for whom I sometimes do clerical work, warned me about an upcoming database job he would have me do, and so I decided to put the Harmonia material aside and try to get through three new DVD box sets—the latest phase in my quest to replace my old videotapes—as quickly as possible so they'd be out of the way by the time he got me started...which he ended up doing before I could finish the third set. Now that I've finished the third DVD set, I can devote full days to his project, which should take me about two days to finish. At that point I can resume the work on the Harmonia stuff, although I can't devote full days to that yet because even before all this I began doing some audio production for my brother, which involves manual time-compression of seventeen hours' worth of raw footage. Hence the "hurry-canes": it always seems as though the fastest I'm able to get these things done is still not fast enough to get them out of the way by the time the next thing comes along. I'm doing the best I can under the circumstances, and eventually I do clear each one out.

There have been some other changes in the last few months as well. Hotter than Ice has gone into something of a state of flux recently, for all intents and purposes losing two of its members partly due to sporadic attendance at rehearsals. Our last gig as a six-piece band was an August 14 two-parter: the first part saw us participate in a Caribbean parade, and the second part was our monthly gig at Groovy's Roti Hut, which because of our personnel problems ended up being our last, at least for the time being. As I understand it, our next gig is slated to be on November 20, probably at the Good Companions Centre, but whether we'll have new musicians to replace or fill in for the old ones, or perform as a four-piece ensemble, remains to be seen.

The Edsels have been working sporadically—our last gig was at the Rideau Carleton Raceway on September 10—and in the last little while I've been given nights off from band practices. The rest of the Edsels know that because of my involvement with other bands, scheduling conflicts can sometimes arise between the Edsels and any of those bands, and as a result they're training another keyboard player, Ted Kennedy, to act as my understudy in case such a conflict arises. So they want to see how well he does without me.

Now for a personal note. If you see me slimming down over the next few months, don't be surprised. I've recently started up again on a special health regimen that I did once before a few years ago. Back then I didn't have much reason to do that regimen, but now I do. I'm only disappointed that this new motivation has come in the form that it has. My doctor diagnosed me with Type 2 diabetes last month.

I've since been taking a three-week diabetes course, and as you might expect, one of the things the instructors mentioned was that newly-diagnosed diabetics tend to have initial-reaction emotions such as denial, fear, anger and so on. I believe that there are a few rare cases in which one emotion you wouldn't expect kicks in: excitement.

Scratching your head? Let me explain. The health regimen I try to consistently follow is Anthony Robbins' Living Health program, which is based on the idea that optimum health requires both getting our cells to be optimally healthy and providing a healthy environment for those cells. Most of us have lifestyles that pollute that inner environment, and as a result, the cells can't get the three things that they need, which are oxygen, the proper nutrients, and avenues to eliminate their own waste. Living Health provides a whole series of ways to clean up that inner environment, make the cells healthy and vibrant again and then keep them that way, and the more of these methods you do, the better off you'll be.

After Robbins first developed this program, he heard of work by an American microbiologist by the name of Dr. Robert O. Young that tied in with what he was already teaching. Young says that we pollute our inner environment through lifestyles that create excess acidity in our systems. You've doubtless heard of the pH scale, where 0 is total acidity, 14 is total alkalinity and 7 is neutral. The body struggles like crazy to maintain a slightly alkaline blood pH of 7.365, and so when we have acidity in the bloodstream, the acid becomes part of the polluted environment in which our cells try to live. With excess acidity comes all sorts of diseases, including diabetes, and so what we need to do is give our bodies plenty of alkalinity to neutralize those acids.

And this isn't just Young talking—there were a couple of 19th-century French scientists, Antoine Bechamp and Claude Bernard, whose combined work established much the same thing. Unfortunately, Bechamp's theory of pleomorphism—the view that microorganisms can go through different stages of development and can evolve into various growth forms within their life cycle, and that these microbes change shape as individuals become diseased—was largely eclipsed by Pasteur's germ theory, which went on to become a significant part of the foundation of mainstream medicine. Ironically, on his deathbed Pasteur admitted the correctness of Bechamp's work, but by then it was too late—the germ theory had already taken far too much hold. Anyway, Robbins was so impressed with Young's work and its results that he worked with him to simplify it for an updated version of the Living Health program, which is what I'm working from. (A more in-depth discussion of Young's approach can be found here.) The first time I did it, I lost something like twenty pounds in three months, and my energy levels started perking up. This is not an approach that works overnight, but rather over a period of time.

I was dating my ex-girlfriend around the tail end of my doing this program the first time, and during our time together she actually beat her own diabetes. Some people she knew called it a miracle, but I believe it was something she did. When it comes to diseases, even ones that are supposedly incurable, there are a few cases in which people have had them and beat them. It's not commonly known, but it's a fact. And now that I was diagnosed, her experience said to me that I could beat my own too. So I started doing Living Health again.

Within days of my starting the regimen anew, I was looking on the net for information on one of Young's alkalinity products when I discovered a book he has recently written called The pH Miracle for Diabetes. Needless to say, I was excited—so much so that I bought a copy of the book the next day.

As you might expect, my mom, who is a retired RN, was skeptical. She's never bought into this idea of optimum health requiring an optimized inner environment and optimally healthy cells. But then again, she's never taken the time to do her own research. So my excitement at learning I have diabetes stems from the opportunity to show her that beating diabetes can be done.

It never rains but it pours. The Edsels now have a booking agent, and as a result we have a plethora of upcoming gigs, some from the agent and some not (see my calendar page for details). The idea of the Edsels playing the Gananoque Casino in May or June has been scrubbed, and we may play a two-nighter there in July or August instead (we do have a one-day gig there tentatively scheduled for the afternoon of July 15). There's been talk of the possibility that the Edsels might play a 50th anniversary gig in Elliot Lake next summer, but we have not yet made any definite plans.

Hot Ice now appears monthly at Groovy's Roti Hut on McArthur on the second Saturday of the month. Among our upcoming gigs are a house party on June 5 and a one-nighter at the Good Companions Centre on June 26. Tickets for the latter event will be available soon.

Allow me to close this newsletter with a warning for those of you who have subscribed to Internet dating services such as match.com or matchmaker.com. As you may recall from my autobiography page and previous newsletters, I met my first girlfriend at 34 and dated her for 27 months, and we split nearly seventeen months ago—a very painful split for me. Having decided in the early part of this year that it was time to stop grieving over losing her, I signed up for memberships on a few matchmaking sites.

On one of them I received an e-mail from someone claiming to be using a friend's account: "I'm Michelle. Come see my profile on SingleFox.com," the message said, indicating the user name. You can't imagine how excited I was at the prospect of having a new significant other after over sixteen months.

Well, I had to create an account on SingleFox to see the profile, and when I did, I was instantly attracted to the woman behind it: she's a trustworthy, tolerant, athletic, toned blonde vegetarian, many of which traits I'd already identified in my profile as things I'm looking for in a woman. So I sent her a message, but SingleFox told me she couldn't read them because she was a trial member too. I tried sending a message to the account from which I'd received the first message, but I wasn't able to get through. I attributed the problem to the fact that I was a trial member and that the other account was on another node—and I gained support for my theory when I created an account on that other node and found out that trial users cannot initiate e-mail conversations.

I was about to give up when I tried looking for the user on match.com, where I have a six-month subscription as MusicBear180, and found her. So I sent her an e-mail telling her of my problems getting in touch with her. However, she sent me a reply saying her name is in fact Tracy, that she had never e-mailed me, and that she had received lots of e-mail from people who had thought her name was something else.

Only then did it dawn on me that Tracy and I and numerous others had been victims of a cruel prank—and there's no way to tell whether a single user or multiple users were responsible for this serious breach of netiquette. It's bad enough we have mischief-makers on the net in the form of spammers, hackers and virus authors—and, in chat rooms such as on AOL Instant Messenger, automated spam messages. But for someone to play on someone's reputation (in this case, Tracy's) and lure other people into a false sense of hope (in this case, mine) is worse than that—it's downright deplorable. These mischief-makers are playing with people's feelings here, and this incident has made me feel both embarrassed and hurt beyond words, both for myself and for Tracy. She doesn't deserve to go through something like this. Nobody does.

So the bottom line is: keep your eyes peeled in such environments, because even online dating services aren't immune to spam.

First, let me apologize for not getting this newsletter out much sooner. Just when you think your projects have settled down, whammo—something else pops up. I've tried to keep this backlog to a minimum, but it hasn't been easy. While I finished my bear book last June, something new started to take hold of a large chunk of my life afterward. Dad had taught me to be something of a packrat, and as one result, I'd taped a lot of TV shows over the previous twenty years or so. Now, with entertainment studios starting to put out DVD packs of their TV series, one pack per season, I've started buying these to replace the tapes, partly to simplify my video library and partly to make more shelf space available. It'll be more economical in the long run too—on two different levels. In the early part of 1999 I spent four months dubbing 500 hours of video—which I now view as being economically stupid. If I'd worked those 500 hours for, say, $12 an hour, I'd have grossed $6,000. So that's $6,000 down the drain plus the cost of about 300 videotapes plus wear and tear on the VCRs, which probably weren't designed to take that level of heavy-duty usage in the first place. Buying these shows on DVD means I save money—other people have done that dubbing work "for" me, DVD is more durable and less magnetically vulnerable than videotape, and the video quality far surpasses what I came up with using two VCRs and a video signal enhancement kit.

Secondly, building a huge video library means I won't have to subscribe to cable TV in the future. I don't generally have a lot of time to watch first-run TV these days—when Star Trek: Enterprise first came out, that's all I had time to watch, and before long I discovered I didn't have time to watch even that. If I paid for cable TV at, say, $50 a month, but had time to watch only one hour of TV a week, it wouldn't be feasible—I would be spending $600 a year to watch a series I could buy on DVD at only $75 a year. And I can get my news fixes via CFRA or my Palm Pilot.

But there's a catch. Every once in a while there are DVDs that have digital glitches on them, and so I have to make the time to go through these DVDs to make sure I don't have to take them back to the store to exchange them for another copy. I don't want to buy these things, wait five or more years, and only then discover I've got a botched copy. So I take about three hours a day going through these, buying two packs a month, and for the most part I haven't found any problems. I've projected that I should be finished by December 2005, eliminating about 200 tapes—some series that I taped, such as The Six Million Dollar Man and Cleopatra 2525, may not be available on DVD on this side of the Atlantic for some time.

That's part of what I've been doing since last July or thereabouts. On top of that, we have some 457 slides that my dad took roughly from the period 1950-1979, and now that DVD players have begun to be sold with the capability of displaying JPEG images—and given that Dad isn't going to be around forever—I've long felt we should have a digitized, captioned set of these slides. I tried to get that done before Christmas so I could make copies of the finished CD-R as Christmas gifts, but my scanner broke down around mid-November to the point where I can still scan opaque stuff, but I can't scan slides properly.

Nor have I had time to address the scanner problem. In November I was handed a project by the Liturgy Committee at St. Augustine's to revamp the music at the 4:30 mass, but nobody seemed able to tell me specifically how we should revamp it. So I gathered all the material the parish has done since CBW I came out in 1972, along with material we hadn't done previously but can now because we learned certain melodies in connection with certain other hymns, and created a cross-reference document listing, by CBW volume and then by hymn number, what CBW-assigned themes were associated with what hymns. Then, in just two and a half weeks, I created a 195,000-word lectionary from scratch, keying the text from a hardcopy Bible, the idea being to create a reference document that would give me some idea of what each Sunday had as a general theme or combination of themes. My aim was to eventually have a reference document that would tell me what hymns best fit what Sundays. Then I found a web site, www.canticanova.com, which gave most of the information I needed. But my work up to that point hadn't been in vain. Cantica Nova is an American site, and we currently use CBW III, which was never authorized for release in the States probably due to copyright issues. As a result, I had to translate Cantica Nova's thematic terminology into CBW-specific terminology, and from the documents I'd created so far I was able to create the Sunday-specific reference document I wanted to create. All this took me four months. I still have some copyright-related issues to address regarding the material I want to use that appears in CBW I and/or II but not in III, but I'm at the point in this project where I don't have to work on it 24/7 any more.

In conjunction with this project, I started another project I'd had in the back of my mind for years but had never begun. I'm currently working on a series of psalm settings for all the Sundays in the liturgical cycle, and the way I do it is probably unique. The Roman Catholic Church uses 75 psalms (out of the available 150) and three canticles on Sundays (I exclude the Easter Triduum from these totals because I never have to worry about music planning for this—other people take care of it for me). For each of these, I write one master setting that includes all the verses that are used for the psalm in question, not just the verses used in the upcoming particular Sunday. For example, Psalm 119 might be broken down so that verses 27-35 might be used on one Sunday and verses 110-125 on another. I write the settings in sort of a hymn style rather than a chant-on-the-verses style, and I write them so that whatever verses we use on a particular Sunday, the resultant extract as a whole will still make musical sense.

For those of you who have complained about the changes I've made to the text for these settings, I'm sorry, but I have no choice. Many times the Grail text that we use does not easily lend itself to musical adaptation, and anyway we've been using those same texts for at least forty years—for example, does anyone, without looking at their dictionaries, really know what "winnowed chaff" is? So I feel the text needs reworking in spots, both to fit the music and to make it easier to understand for today's audience. I use The Living Bible and the Good News Bible as my alternate sources.

On the performance front, things have really started to pick up in the last several months. One of my bands, Hotter than Ice, has begun playing semi-regularly at Groovy's Roti Hut, and next month we're about to begin appearing there regularly on the second Saturday of each month. We have since done a couple of performances at the Good Companions Centre, a house party in South March and a peaceful anti-racism demonstration at DND headquarters on Colonel By Drive.

During one of our appearances at Groovy's, I dropped of a copy of my promo kit with the owner, Groovy Wilson, a trombonist with the Ottawa-area band Stone Soul Picnic. So much did he like what he heard of my CD that he got in touch with Stone Soul Picnic's lead vocalist, Vijay Agard, who hired me to sub for the band's regular keyboardist at a gig in Hull on February 14. As a result, I'm now a reserve member of the band: if we get a booking at a place that can't afford the whole band, then the band will give its horn section the night off and assign the horn parts to me. We were supposed to appear at Bar de l'Ouest on March 10, but that gig got bumped back to March 19 and then to April 7—and has since been postponed yet again. In the meantime, Stone Soul Picnic is currently negotiating a gig at Tucson's for July 17, but as far as I know the date hasn't yet been set in stone.

The Fabulous Edsels now have their own web site, www.thefabulousedsels.ca. We have recently got ourselves a booking agent—and, as you might expect, more gigs. Check out my finally-updated calendar page for specific dates. Like last year, I'm planning to be in Toronto this year for Toronto Trek. This time I'll be there from June 28 to July 5. If you're in the Toronto area and you have an event there you'd like me to play at during that time frame, let me know so I can plan my time accordingly.

On a personal note, I was browsing through the online version of the Connecticut Post on March 21 when I found an obituary worth noting. My ex-girlfriend had a friend, Nadia Czubatyj of Milford, CT, who had died on March 19. I had known Nadia and her husband Lu—not, of course, as well as I'd known my ex, but better than I'd known most of my ex's other friends. I wasn't able to go to the funeral, mostly because I didn't want to cause my ex any more grief than she was obviously going through, and partly because I'd found out about the funeral too late to give Greyhound their required 24 hours' notice to reserve a seat on the bus to New York City—when going to Connecticut I always transferred buses in the Big Apple.

But I did mark the event in other ways. If I'm ever inclined to "cry in my beer", as I was the morning of the funeral, I go to a Starbucks and order a venti frappuccino. I did this at the exact same time a service for Nadia was being held at the funeral home. Less than a week later I set up an announced mass in her memory for next March 19. And the next teddy bear I add to my collection will be named for her.

Requiescat in pace, Nadia. Du wirst vermißt sein...

Nadia Czubatyj—1944-2004